“beautifully delivered as a one woman tour de force by a brilliant Judy Rosenblatt”
Jermyn Street Theatre is a tiny but perfect venue that I must have wandered past for years before I knew it existed. Once I did, I was always intrigued by the descending stairs that disappeared into a mysterious curve, leaving the studio tantalisingly out of view. I was excited at the thought of finally finding out what magic lay at the bottom of the steps!
The real life of Peggy (Marguerite) Guggenheim, art collector, daughter, sister, mother, lover, wife, ex-wife, drinker and survivor, is peeked at in this play by Lanie Robertson. Set in one room of her villa in her beloved adopted home of Venice (design by Erika Rodriguez), Peggy lays bare her love of life, men and art. She reminiscences in her lounge or talks on the phone, she speaks to a person offstage as a matter of fact or as a passing aside, giving an insight into the strong woman she is. She was however, in an era that found independent women difficult to deal with, both notorious and scandalous; yet she was content with that, enjoying it more often than not.
Peggy’s amazing history, her losses and loves, and her discovery of contemporary art emerge as we hear her recount snippets of her life. We drift in and out of her thoughts as she fights to keep the significant pieces of art she has lovingly amassed as a single collection – this is her legacy for the future and it is her priority.
These pictures and sculptures are more ‘children’ to her than her flesh and blood, and as she battles for their future it becomes clear that many relationships in her life have taken second place to it, and there are consequences for that. Her stories are humourous, bittersweet, and sometimes tragic.
Directed by Austin Pendleton, this production of Woman Before a Glass is beautifully delivered as a one woman tour de force by a brilliant Judy Rosenblatt as Peggy. There is a great mix of audience acknowledgement, factual information, comic storytelling, sympathy, and understated sadness.
“tension was sorely lacking, and the play’s violent denouement was a damp squib
Jermyn Street Theatre is a little gem of a venue a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. It was great to see a sold-out house for the opening night of The Wasp, and the quality set design on display (excellent work by Mike Leopold) promised an evening’s theatre to match. For this reviewer, alas, that promise was not fulfilled.
The Wasp by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm is a two-handed thriller, in which a pair of estranged school friends meet as adults, and a train of events is set in motion fuelled by a couple of violent incidents in their shared past. This is a tried-and-tested formula, and despite one genuinely surprising plot twist, formulaic is how the writing felt. The monologues felt like set pieces, and the dialogue was often over-explanatory; there was never enough work for the audience to do. This was particularly true in the exposition of the play’s central symbolic image – the parasitic tarantula hawk moth – but equally present in the women’s conversation. ‘It looks like we’re more like each other than we thought then, eh?’ Carla says at one point. There’s more fun for the audience in seeing that for itself.
Similarly, the characters themselves rarely strayed beyond stereotype. From the moment we meet them – Carla, all fake tan and gold, heavily pregnant and smoking a fag, and Heather, dressed from the Browns catalogue and drinking a camomile tea – the two women remain trapped in the tropes of their class background. Lisa Gorgin (Carla) and Selina Giles (Heather) worked well together, and there was some lovely detail in each performance, but despite the emotional reveal at the play’s heart, there was little scope for them to go beyond the skin-deep. As a result, tension was sorely lacking, and the play’s violent denouement was a damp squib. On-stage violence is frequently difficult to pull off, and the play needed stronger directorial decisions here, to enable credibility in such an intimate space.
It would have been interesting to see where Anna Simpson (Director) could have taken us with less naturalistic emphasis. There was a nod to a slightly more abstract theatrical language in the transition between Scene 1 and 2, but it didn’t go far enough, and, as a result, what could have been an eerie interlude came across as as a slightly clumsy scene change. The trouble with naturalism is that it is easy to set situations up for a fall; I, for one, have never known a heavily pregnant woman last so long without needing a pee, and we all know what a mess knives make.
In a world saturated with (often excellent) television thrillers, the theatre can only hold its own by drawing on its strengths. The Wasp failed to deliver on these, and thus was devoid of sting.
